The Three Interactive Elements of Reading

Explanation of the Ice cream chart:

            Three scoops of ice cream were used to illustrate the three interactive elements of reading. As seen in the image, the scoops were positioned next to each other. It shows that the three elements are interrelated.

            The strawberry ice cream represents the reader. Knowing the prior knowledge, misconceptions and the teaching strategies of the reader is essential in teaching reading. Teachers have a big role in helping the students to recognize and change their misconceptions about the topic or subject they are reading. The teachers also need to motivate students to learn and practice reading strategies.

            The chocolate ice cream represents the climate. The climate affects the students’ attitude towards learning. The role of the teachers is to create a classroom climate that is conducive for learning. In our handout, the National Research Council (NRC) described an effective learning environment into four dimensions: learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered.

            The vanilla ice cream represents the text features. Vocabulary improvement is important in reading across the subject areas. Having an existing schema or mental framework about the topic can help the students understand more about the text they are reading. Moreover, it is also essential to consider the text style that includes the text structure, text coherence, and audience appropriateness.

            It is important to know the three elements (reader, climate, and text features) because they affect the reading comprehension of the learners.

Reflection as a Teacher and Student

            People expect the English teachers only to teach reading. It gives me pressure knowing that I also have to teach the students the other macro-skills like writing, listening, speaking, and viewing. Our selection is refreshing. It gave me some ideas on how to collaborate with my co-teachers so we can work together in teaching the students about reading.

            I always start reading with some questions about their prior knowledge. I want to know what they know and what their schemas about a certain topic are. After that, I help them to unlock the difficulties by teaching some vocabulary words before reading the actual selection. That is my routine every time we read. I am surprised that the teachers of other content areas can also apply that method.

            The teachers have a great role in motivating students to read. The classroom climate depends on the beliefs, attitude and values. It is important the teachers know the teaching strategies to teach the students to read with comprehension.

            As a student who studies the how to teach English Language Teaching, I believe that this selection really gave me many teaching strategies in reading. The challenge now is to apply these teaching strategies in my classroom as well as the classroom of the colleagues.